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Navigating India's earned media ecosystem demands more than just a translated press release. It requires cultural literacy and deep regional relevance. Drawing from years on the ground, our India Regional Associate Director explores how brands can build authentic credibility and leverage the growing communications corridor between India and ASEAN.
When global brands first arrive in India, I often see them equipped with polished global decks, confident narratives, and the assumption that visibility simply follows investment. Some of them are right. Most of them are quickly humbled.
What I have come to understand throughout the years, through early morning calls with editors, late-night pitches across time zones, and a thousand conversations in between, is that success in India hinges entirely on deep relevance rather than mere physical presence.
In my experience, this market cares far less about heavy paid media budgets and far more about stories that truly resonate. That resonance has to be tailored, whether you are speaking with a journalist in Mumbai's business press, an editor in a Tamil daily, a vernacular YouTuber in Tier-2 Uttar Pradesh, or a Gen-Z influencer sharing Instagram Reels in Hinglish.
If you want to succeed here, the rules of global public relations must be rewritten. The core logic of this shift is that unlocking India's vast potential requires replacing copy-paste global narratives with highly localised, culturally fluent storytelling.
India is not a single media market; it is a complex web of dozens of competing regional ecosystems, each with its own distinct languages, cultures, and editorial gatekeepers.
I constantly remind my partners that we navigate dozens of overlapping ecosystems that occasionally speak past each other. To put this scale into perspective, the Indian media landscape currently supports:
The resulting media universe grows faster than any algorithm can map. Each region, from the Malayalam and Tamil hubs in the south to the Marathi, Bengali, and Kannada heartlands, has unique definitions of what constitutes a story worth telling.
What earns trust in Delhi's English business media may fall completely flat in Ahmedabad's Gujarati press. I have seen firsthand how a story that lands nationally in English dailies often needs entirely different framing, rooted in local aspirations or community values, to travel regionally.
Earned media is critical for brand survival because India's digitally native consumers are highly sceptical of manufactured advertising and heavily cross-reference brand claims.
This shift from paid to earned media is something I witness every day. Building authentic trust has evolved from a nice-to-have aspiration into an absolute necessity.
India's digitally native middle class is now the primary driver of consumption across categories. With 958 million internet users spending heavy time on their smartphones, consumers read between the lines. They cross-reference claims, share scepticism on WhatsApp groups, and heavily favour authenticity over slick advertising.
You cannot buy your way into credibility in India. You must earn it story by story, relationship by relationship, and context by context. Brands that treat PR as a volume game of mass press releases will always lose out to those investing in genuine cultural literacy.
"Effective earned media in India operates as a long-term negotiation, balancing what a brand wants to say with what local journalists believe their communities actually need to know." - Sanil Shirsat - Regional Associate Director, India at Ellerton & Co.
The India-ASEAN corridor offers massive growth opportunities because both regions share a business culture that prioritises long-term relationships, storytelling, and localised trust.
Southeast Asia is watching India with intent. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) represents a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of nearly $4 trillion, a consumer base of nearly 680 million people, and a business culture that prizes relationships, storytelling, and long-term trust values that map neatly onto what effective PR in India also demands.
However, sharing similar values does not make cross-border expansion automatic. Neighbouring ASEAN businesses face the exact same localisation hurdles as Western brands when trying to navigate India's hyper-diverse media landscape. Recognising this gap is precisely why I am so passionate about building the India-ASEAN communications corridor through Ellerton & Co.
Right now, the conversations I am having are highly strategic and moving in real time:
The ultimate lesson here applies to any company entering India, regardless of its origin.. When a global giant like South Korea’s Hyundai entered India, they succeeded because they built cars for Indian roads and used local storytelling to win the market. On the flip side, brands like Dunkin' Donuts struggled heavily because they misjudged local morning eating habits.
My number one piece of advice is that you can never simply export a product without localising the story that surrounds it.
This corridor is very much a two-way street. Indian tech startups, D2C challengers, and infrastructure giants are waking up to ASEAN as a primary growth theatre.
Markets like Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia boast young demographics and a hunger for brands that carry both aspiration and authenticity. The Indian story, told well, resonates beautifully there.
But telling it well requires local intelligence. You must understand that earned media in Kuala Lumpur operates under a completely different set of cultural codes than earned media in Bengaluru.
Mastering PR in India requires shifting away from volume-based press release distribution and focusing heavily on building genuine media relationships and deep editorial understanding.
What we bring to this corridor is a philosophy I stand by deeply: communications work built on genuine media relationships will always outperform campaigns built entirely on volume and velocity. We are in the business of building the kind of credibility that makes a journalist in Singapore want to write about your brand, and makes an editor in Mumbai want to feature it on page one.
India's PR industry is professionalising rapidly. Measurement has matured, and integrated communications is the new standard. Within that evolution, the demand for specialists who understand both the macro ecosystem and the micro nuances of individual markets is growing faster than supply.
The brands that will win in this environment are the ones that invest early, commit to the long game, and find partners who know exactly which door to knock on and how.
Stay informed with Ellerton & Co.’s latest updates and expert insights at the intersection of PR and business.
